Chapter 6 (The Time Machine)

01CHAPTER VI.

02It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way.

03I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.

04They were just the half-bleached color of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum.

05And they were filthily cold to the touch.

06Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.

07The next night I did not sleep well.

08Probably my health was a little disordered.

09I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt.

10Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear, for which I could perceive no definite reason.

11I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall, where the little people were sleeping in the moonlight.

12That night Weena was among them, and feeling reassured by their presence.

13It occurred to me even then that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these unpleasant creatures from below, these whiten lemurs, this new vermin that had replaced the old, might be more abundant.

14And on both these days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty.

15I felt assured that the time machine was only to be recovered by boldly penetrating these underground mysteries.

16Yet I could not face the mystery.

17If only I had had a companion it would have been different.

18But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness of the well appalled me.

19I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.

20It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps, that drove me further and further afield in my exploring expeditions.

21Going to the south-westward, towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood, I observed far off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen.

22It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew.

23And the façade had an oriental look, the face of it having the luster as well as the pale green tint, a kind of bluish-green of a certain type of Chinese porcelain.

24This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I was minded to push on and explore.

25But the day was growing late, and I had come upon the site of the place after a long and tiring circuit, so I resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day, and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of little Wina.

26But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the palace of green porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded.

27I resolved I would make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.

28Little Wina ran with me.

29She danced beside me to the well, but when she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely disconcerted.

30"'Good-bye, little Wina,' I said, kissing her, and then putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing-hooks.

31Rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage might leak away.

32At first she watched me in amazement.

33Then she gave a most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with her little hands.

34I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed.

35I shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in the throat of the well.

36I saw her agonized face over the parapet, and smiled to reassure her.

37Then I clung to look down at the unstable hooks to which I clung.

38I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards.

39The descent was affected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent.

40And not simply fatigued.

41One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath.

42For a moment I hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again.

43Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.

44Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disk in which a star was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round black projection.

45The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more oppressive.

46Everything, save that little disk above, was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again, Weena had disappeared.

47I was in an agony of discomfort.

48I had some thought of trying to go up the shaft again, and leave the underworld alone.

49But even while I turned this over in my mind, I continued to descend.

50At last, with intense relief, I saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender loophole in the wall.

51Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest.

52It was not too soon.

53My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling with the prolonged terror of a fall.

54Besides this, the unbroken darkness had had a distressing effect upon my eyes.

55The air was full of the throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.

56I do not know how long I lay.

57I was roused by a soft hand touching my face.

58Starting up in the darkness, I snatched at my matches, and, hastily striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures, similar to the one I had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the light.

59Living as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way.

60I have no doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light.

61But so soon as I struck a match in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark gutters and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest fashion.

62I tried to call to them, but the language they had was apparently different from that of the over-world people, so that I was needs left to my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was even then in my mind.

63But, I said to myself, you are in for it now, and feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow louder.

64Presently, the walls fell away from me, and I came into a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of my light.

65The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the burning of a match.

66Necessarily, my memory is vague.

67Great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral morlocks sheltered from the glare.

68The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the air.

69Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal, laid with what seemed a meal.

70The morlocks, at any rate, were carnivorous.

71Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have survived to furnish the red joint I saw.

72It was all very indistinct.

73The heavy smell, the big, unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again.

74Then the match burned down and stung my fingers and fell, a wriggling red spot in the blackness.

75I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience.

76When I had started with the time-machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.

77I had come without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke.

78At times I missed tobacco frightfully.

79Even without enough matches.

80If only I had thought of a Kodak!

81I could have flashed that glimpse of the underworld in a second, and examined it at leisure.

82But, as it was, I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that nature had endowed me with—'hands, feet, and teeth—these, and four safety-matches that still remained to me.

83I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run low.

84It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishing the upper-worlders, to whom fire was a novelty.

85Now, as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark a hand touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a peculiar, unpleasant odor.

86I fancied I heard the breathing of a crowd of these dreadful little beings about me.

87I felt the box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands behind me plucking at my clothing.

88The sense of these unseen creatures examining me was indescribably unpleasant.

89The sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the darkness.

90I shouted at them as loudly as I could.

91They started away, and then I could feel them approaching me again.

92They clutched at me more boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other.

93I shivered violently, and shouted again rather discordantly.

94This time they were not so seriously alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me.

95I will confess I was horribly frightened.

96I determined to strike another match and escape under the protection of its glare.

97I did so, and, eking out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my retreat to the narrow tunnel.

98But I had scarce entered this when my light was blown out, and in the darkness I could hear the Morlocks rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain as they hurried after me.

99In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back.

100I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces.

101You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked, those pale, chinless faces, and great, lidless, pinkish-gray eyes, as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.

102But I did not stay to look, I promise you.

103I retreated again, and when my second match had ended I struck my third.

104It had almost burned through when I reached the opening into the shaft.

105I laid down on the edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy.

106Then I felt sideways for the projecting hooks, and as I did so my feet were grass from behind, and I was violently tugged backward.

107I lit my last match, and it incontinently went out.

108But I had my hand on the climbing bars now, and kicking violently I disengaged myself from the clutches of the Morlocks, and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while they stayed peering and blinking up at me.

109All but one little wretch who followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.

110That climb seemed interminable to me.

111With the last twenty or thirty feet of it, a deadly nausea came upon me.

112I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hold.

113The last few yards was a frightful struggle against this faintness.

114Several times my head swam, and I felt all the sensations of falling.

115At last, however, I got over the well-mouth somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight.

116I fell upon my face.

117Even the soil smelled sweet and clean.

118Then I remember Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the Eloi.

119Then, for a time, I was insensible.

120End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6 End of Chapter 6